A. MARTINE

Lady Macbeth

You sit atop a quaking earth
Sometimes you feel, when you lay your hand on the bed’s surface
Tiny tremors running up its length

Perhaps they are the scores
Of all the gushing evils it saw you do here
Words and sighs like the aftershock of surprise

Put this in your mouth and hold it:
You were too young for the lessons you learned
But you would have learned them anyway

Woman, a Universe unto herself
Pyre onto which they throw every little thing that hurt
And every other thing that counted

Imagine yourself a poem, a running metaphor
Volta, life swiveled and whorled by guilt
The sound it makes is a seething kind of noise

People godding you while they tether you with one hand
Want more than you are being told you can get
Head scarred from all the glass ceilings you knocked into

It hurts, it is a yearning in which
One can never settle, because the other side of yearning
It comes at your heels, savage, thankless, tripping

Imagine yourself midway through the air
Trapeze flying as you discover that you are the dreaded Void
And you let go

Matryoshka-like, you trick: you are not kind
It has sidestepped you, maybe this feeling shall pass
Crow-like over you, and swoop

Imagine feeling powerful and power-less
All at the same time. Imagine wanting to massacre, to maul
And being relegated as Grace and Mercy’s figurehead

You sometimes wonder about the strain it takes to dangle-swing
Your hands they were always too small

Your fingers dry and twig-like
So you’ve decided to cross bridges
When you get to them
You are nobody’s mother
You resent being vaunted as such
Away with their terrible glory, then

I’m going back to my crows, my martlets
My good water
And whatever comes from it

unmoor

drag finger down the length of a known one’s forearm like this morning, on dusty elevator wall. dust on finger tells a story, but skin on skin too seldom does. can’t relate. you excite tumult when you do things like this, but won’t stop you, never has before. can’t relate, can’t relate and need to.

palpate your mother’s hair to find alikeness. steal a pat-pat from your father, casual and all. baby handed makes you recoil, but still, trace and trace the skin to seek it. what ties you to them, to anyone. can’t relate. shun being touched, and need it like you need water. it will make it make sense.

wake when someone breaks from a hug before you’re ready to. everything, everything. a palm on a door handle just swiveled by another palm. what does warmth mean. at this point, would say yes to anything you would.

when you touch, it is not closeness you hunt but what lurks underneath. significance, something like it. your eye finds another one’s eye and you feel yourself. you come in focus and you feel yourself, chest contractions, tongue ‘tween teeth, toe in searing sand but it blinks and gone again you are. can’t relate, wish you could.

have forgotten how to comfort people. drag fingers down the length of things instead, hoping you will leave equivalent trace. burst into existence with pinching heart falling in love with everyone smiles your way but reel when a person touches you but tracing the outline of a forearm wishing it around you but sitting sideways and out on any chair it hurts it hurts. did this to yourself, will continue to.

when the car veers too much on the side and bodies melt sideways into bodies: for a moment you are one and the same. hip bones grind into each other, shoulders rub against, skin borrows another skin’s softness-warmth. in this moment, closer kind of art than you have ever felt, made, known. will you continue casting spells until and until and until you can relate? you will.

Blood Magic 

i. 

When we fight, skin tender from a petty blow,
scalp sore from a fistful of braids pulled solid,
afterwards, we cut up white tissues into bitbitbits and
swallow, conjury we have made our own, drawing the world around us
in our own lovely image. Apology, casual and clear hinges on
the sacraments we make, us being eight and ten and thirteen and fourteen.
Finger pricking finger, blood to blood, seals a promise or a lie,
sometimes a crooked pact at least one of us will pretend to forget years on.
Cap ou pas cap, I’m rubber you’re glue, qui va à la chasse perd sa place and whatnot:
we aren’t adults, crying wolves, squandering tolerance and compassion.
When my lifeblood spills into yours it sings music-like,
water returned to water, form gone back to form.
When our essence collides, it shakes and rattles the world, rubble cast to feet.
Sight to behold, terrible only to those who don’t know
what it is to carry another person within you,
to hate and love as forcefully as if, in fact
it were not at them, but at your very own self.
Prismatic, dizzying in its divinity,
song and dance tests your mettle and takes
everything from you — but still it dares you keep playing,
even in the pointless hour, even in the thankless one.
We proffer white tissues as if to sop up all of it unspilt,
that which binds us flesh to soul.
The slight forgotten the injury dull-dulled, the barbed word
still latching but easier to pluck out.
Borrowed comb, torn skirt, stinging insult, spiteful lie:
who am I trying to forgive? 

ii.

One day she sees someone shred a stark-white tissue,
seated on the table beside them. A child;
and she almost leaves the Today moment and the tenseness therein,
the emotion being shattered in the negative space between them,
this replica of an exchange she has had with infinite people,
almost lovers, suddenly friends, broken strangers, even herself.
She has lost the facile compassion, that curiosity for crooked pacts.
Who am I trying to forgive is a misshapen song;
keep playing, pointless, thankless as ever.
But who are you, quiet one, without your kin,
the only place you could call home?
Now that is the question: no wonder she is lost.
The Leaving, it lasts a violent second and they intrude:
the negative space the forlorn child the shredding of the white tissues.
She looks past the man and sees others before her, and she can only watch,
and the concerto of rrrrrripping, it baits her memories.
Wishing peace could be conjured and achieved so easily,
she knows no amount of wanting, no amount of magical thinking,
no amount of talking will mend what has happened here,
has been happening for rising, then crashing years.
Which reminds her: she hasn’t spoken to her brother in a few weeks,
has lost sight of two sisters, in bursts, and then a long, tracking shot,
and her other sibling’s words lie idle in her phone.
The adults crying wolves have had their say, not in form of howls,
but a sulk that makes cut up tissues pointless.
Why remedy to that which has not been felt/seen/said in years?

of tongues and flames and gratitude

in three years will be twenty since i
started spleening and letting tongues of
flame lick the length of me. in three years
will be ten since i gave that gorgeous
precipice the eye, wishing to fall,
and that minx flirted right back at me.
in three years eight since i double take-d
corners where i thought i saw devil and co.
calling me to come along and play,
and others, others. took my cobains,
my winehouses too seriously.
said i’d never make it to thirty;
but anything can happen ‘tween years
and years. in three years might even have
put a rope around the voice said that
black girls are magic but you’ll never
have that kind of magic, kind that make
melanin pop-pop, every angle,
make you float ether-like over all
your detractors, including yourself.
kind that make even the bigots cock
an eyebrow and say whoa there now that’s
something to see. in three years will be
fifteen since i took hammer to toe
in throe of frenzy, pushed exacto
knife to throat, rubbed mentholatum in
symmetrical cuts just to say i
felt what was what. i tell people i
have birthmarks all over my body.
if hatred of self were beauty i
would never have cause to hate again.
damn, those were crazy years. put that far
behind me, though, peachy-keen. convinced
self and others i am fine; but look
closer, check my pillow, still: there be
teeth marks where i bite down when in it
i howl. yet anything can happen
‘tween years and years. in three years i could
learn my blessed ancestral language.
gratitude it pays for everything.
say thank you thank youthankyouthankyou;
my mother knew to tongue it even
and especially when the swelling
years showed up to heckle, and every
woman before; so shall the next ones,
too. they let you tolerate the taste
of it, no idle words, no idlesong, until everything that follows,
even the bygone and coming time,
even three years (give or take) carries
the tang of it, gratitude and all.

A. Martine is a trilingual writer, musician and artist of color who goes where the waves take her. She might have been a kraken in a past life. She's an Assistant Editor at Reckoning and a Managing Editor/Producer at The Nasiona. Her collection AT SEA was shortlisted for the 2019 Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize. Some words found or forthcoming in: Berfrois, Déraciné, The Rumpus, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Metaphorosis, South Broadway Ghost Society, Gone Lawn, Rogue Agent, Boston Accent Lit, Porridge Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Figure 1, Willawaw, Tenderness Lit. @Maelllstrom/www.maelllstrom.com.